POWER7 To Ship In First Half of 2010

BBCWatcher writes "In CPU news, IBM says that its POWER7 servers will start shipping in the first half of 2010, on schedule or perhaps even a few months early if you believe Wikipedia. Moreover, upgrades from a wide variety of POWER6 models will be mere CPU swaps, with the upgraded servers keeping their same serial numbers. (Bean counters like that.) POWER7 sports up to 8 cores per die, 4 threads per core, a clock speed a Hertz or two above 4 GHz, 45 nm process manufacturing, on-chip DDR3, and up to 1,000 micropartitions per machine. IBM claims that POWER7 will offer about 256 Gflops per die and two to three times the performance per watt as POWER6. IBM wants to keep taking orders now for its POWER6 gear (duh), so its sales reps are allegedly ready and eager to deal on 6-cum-7 packages. And it looks like that cunning plan could work rather well given Sun's Rock CPU cancellation and HP's delay of Tukwila Itanium to 2010. (Is anybody still in the server CPU race except IBM, Intel, and maybe AMD?) In 2006, POWER7 won the contest for a DARPA supercomputing R&D grant of $244 million, so you could say that each US citizen is in for about a dollar already."

Comments

Look at Cell on PS3...

[HerculesMO]

Was super fast, had a bunch of benefits, and at the end, nobody wants to program for it. Sure, people do it, but if you read folks like Carmack who prefer Xbox programming than PS3 simply because it's easier to program in, it makes you wonder about the utility of all this new architecture when the development tools aren't mature to support it.

That said, I'm far from a programmer so I can't make any assumptions about this -- but all I can say is I wonder how it will play out, either like Cell or like Intel. I have no idea.